CHAP. IV.

The

Franks.

CHAPTER IV

RESTORATION OF THE EMPIRE IN THE WEST

It was towards Rome as their ecclesiastical capital that the thoughts and hopes of the men of the sixth and seventh centuries were constantly directed. Yet not from Rome, feeble and corrupt, nor on the exhausted soil of Italy, was the deliverer to arise. Just when, as we may suppose, the vision of a renewal of imperial authority in the Western provinces was beginning to vanish away, there appeared in the furthest corner of Europe, sprung of a race but lately brought within the pale of civilization, a line of chieftains devoted to the service of the Holy See, and among them one whose power, good fortune, and heroic character pointed him out as worthy of a dignity. to which doctrine and tradition had attached a sanctity almost divine.

Of the new monarchies that had risen on the ruins of Rome, that of the Franks was by far the greatest. In the third century they appear, with Saxons, Alemanni, and Thuringians, as one of the greatest German tribe leagues. The Sicambri (for it seems probable that this famous race was a chief source of the Frankish nation) had now laid aside their former hostility to Rome, and her future representatives were thenceforth, with few intervals, her faithful allies. Many of their chiefs rose to high places: Malarich receives from Jovian the charge of the Western provinces ; Bauto and Mellobaudes figure in the days of Theodosius

and his sons; the legendary Merovech (grandfather of CHAP. IV. Clovis, and supposed to be the son of a water-sprite), whose name has given itself to the Merwing dynasty, is said to have fought under Aetius against Attila in the great battle of Chalons; his countrymen endeavoured in vain to save Gaul from the Suevi and Burgundians. Not till the Empire was evidently helpless did they claim a share of the booty; then Clovis, or Chlodovech, chief of the Salian tribe, leaving his kindred the Ripuarians in their seats on the lower Rhine, advanced out of Flanders to wrest Gaul from the barbarian nations which had en- a.d. 489. tered it some sixty years before. Few conquerors have had a career of more unbroken success. By the defeat of the Roman governor Syagrius he was left master of the Northern provinces: the Burgundian kingdom in the valley of the Rhone was in no long time reduced to dependence: last of all, the West Gothic power was overthrown in one great battle, and Aquitaine added to the dominions of Clovis. Nor were the Frankish arms less prosperous against the Germans who dwelt beyond the Rhine. A victory (supposed to have been won at Tolbiac) led to the submission of the Alemanni: their allies the Bavarians followed, and when the Thuringian power had been broken by Theodorich I (son of Clovis), the Frankish league embraced all the tribes of Western and Southern Germany. The dominion thus formed, stretching from the Bay of Biscay to the Inn and the Ems, was of course in no sense a Gallic empire. Nor, although the widest and strongest monarchy that had yet been founded by a Teutonic race, was it, under the Merovingian kings, a united kingdom at all, but rather a congeries of principalities, held together by the predominance of a single tribe and a single family, who ruled in Gaul as masters over a subject race, and in Germany exercised a sort of hegemony among kindred and

CHAP. IV.

scarcely inferior tribes. But towards the middle of the eighth century a change began. Under the rule of Pipin of Herstal and his son Charles Martel, mayors of the palace to the last feeble Merovingians, the Austrasian Franks in the lower Rhineland became acknowledged heads of the nation, and were able, while establishing a firmer government at home, to direct its whole strength to projects of foreign ambition. The form those projects. took arose from a circumstance which has not yet been mentioned. It was not solely or even chiefly to their own valour that the Franks owed their past greatness and the yet loftier future which awaited them, it was to the friendship of the clergy and the favour of the Apostolic See. The other Teutonic nations, Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Suevians, Lombards, had been most of them converted by Arian missionaries who proceeded from the Roman Empire during the short period when Arian doctrines were in the ascendant. The Franks, who were among the latest converts, were Catholics from the first, and after the days of Clovis, whom the clergy had welcomed as a sort of new Constantine, gladly accepted the clergy as their teachers and allies. Thus it was that while the hostility of their orthodox subjects had weakened the Vandal kingdom in Africa and the East Gothic kingdom in Italy, the eager sympathy of the priesthood helped the Franks to vanquish their Burgundian and West Gothic enemies, and made it comparatively easy for them to blend with the Roman population in the provinces. They had done good service against the Saracens of Spain; they had aided the English Winfrith (St. Boniface) in his mission to the heathen of Germany; and at length, as the most power

a

Denique gens Francorum multos et foecundissimos fructus Domino attulit, non solum credendo, sed et alios salutifere convertendo,' says the Emperor Lewis II in A.D, 871.

ful among Catholic nations, they attracted the eyes of the CHAP. IV. ecclesiastical head of the West, now sorely bested by

domestic foes.

Lombards.

Since the invasion of Alboin, Italy had groaned under Italy: the a complication of evils. The Lombards who had entered along with that chief in A.D. 568 had settled in considerable numbers in the valley of the Po, which became the seat of their kingdom, and had founded the duchies of Spoleto and Benevento, leaving the Adriatic coast as well as Rome and the Southern provinces to be governed by the exarch of Ravenna as viceroy of the Eastern crown. This subjection was, however, little better than nominal. Although too few to occupy the whole peninsula, the invaders were yet strong enough to harass every part of it by inroads which met with little resistance from a population unused to arms, and without the spirit to use them in self-defence. More cruel and repulsive, if we may believe the evidence of their enemies, than any other of the Northern tribes, the Lombards were certainly singular in their aversion to the clergy, never admitting them to the national councils. Tormented by their repeated attacks, Rome sought help in vain from Constantinople, whose forces, scarce able to repel from her walls the Avars and Saracens, could give no support to the distant exarch of Ravenna. The Popes were the Emperor's subjects; they The Popes. awaited his confirmation, like other bishops; they had more than once been the victims of his anger. But as the city became more accustomed to a practical independence, and the Pope rose to a predominance, real if not yet legal, his tone grew bolder than that of the Eastern patriarchs. In the controversies that had raged in the Church, he had had the wisdom or good fortune to espouse (though

This befel Pope Martin I, as in earlier days Sylverius.

CHAP. IV.

Iconoclastic

controversy, A.D. 726.

A.D. 732.

not always from the first) the orthodox side: it was now by another quarrel of religion that his deliverance from an unwelcome yoke was accomplished.

The Emperor Leo, born among the Isaurian mountains, where a simpler faith may yet have lingered, and stung by the Mohammedan taunt of idolatry, determined to abolish the worship of images, which seemed to be fast obscuring the more spiritual part of Christianity. An attempt which had been sufficient to cause tumults among the submissive populations of the East excited in Italy a fiercer commotion. The people rose with one heart in defence of what had become to them more than a symbol: the exarch was slain: the Pope, though unwilling to sever himself from the lawful head and protector of the Church, must yet resist and rebuke the prince whom he could not reclaim from so hateful a heresy. Liudprand, king of the Lombards, improved his opportunity. Falling on the Exarchate as the champion of images, on Rome as the pretended ally of the Emperor, he overran the one, and all but succeeded in capturing the other. Overawing Liudprand by the majesty of his office, the Pope escaped for the moment, but he saw his peril. Placed between a heretic and an invader, he turned his gaze beyond the Alps, to a Catholic chief who had just achieved a signal deliverance for Christendom by his defeat of the Spanish Musulmans on the field of Poitiers. Gregory II, though his reluctance to break with the Eastern Empire led him to dissuade the North Italians from the notion of setting up an Emperor against Leo, had already opened commue Vigilius in the days of Justinian, and Honorius I in those of Heraclius, had lapsed for a time into error.

d See Note III at end.

е

e' Ammonebat ne a fide vel amore imperii Romani desisterent.' — Liber Pontificalis, ed. Duchesne, vol. i. p. 407. So Paulus Diaconus (ch. xliv): 'Omnis Ravennae exercitus vel Venetiarum talibus iussis [the command to